[Flamesguy_SJ]

"Well, that's just Prime..."

With our lucky number 13th pick, The Channel Surfers select Beast Wars: Transformers in the Animated category.

wiki:

Beast Wars: Transformers (Beasties on YTV, due to YTV discomfort over the name[1]) is a Transformers toyline released by Hasbro between 1995 and 1999, and a full-CG animated television series spawned by it that debuted in 1996. The Emmy Award-winning series was set in the "original" Transformers universe as a sequel to the original series (which was later rebooted by various limited comic book stories from several companies including Dreamwave comics and IDW).

The two main factions of robot Transformers are descendants of the two main factions in the original cartoon series: the Maximals are the descendants of the Autobots and the Predacons are the descendants of the Decepticons. The names were intended to stem from the terms Mammal and Predator but were not necessarily consistent with the alternate forms of the Transformers.(In Beast Machines, the process during which Autobots and Decepticons became Maximals and Predacons is respectively referred to as the "The Great Upgrade".)


The leader of the Predacons team is Megatron. He and his forces are a splinter group on the hunt for powerful crystals known as Energon, to be used in a ploy for power and dominance. They do this with the aid of artifacts known as the Golden Disk and Megatron's stolen ship, the Darksyde, which is equipped with a transwarp drive. A Maximal exploration ship, the Axalon, led by Optimus Primal, is sent to stop them. Together the ships plunge through a time/space phenomenon created by the transwarp device during their battle in space, and land on a mysterious planet.



The planet is soon found to be rich in deposits of raw Energon, to the point that it proves to be poisonous to both factions' robot forms, forcing the factions to take on alternate organic forms for protection until their robot forms are needed. Thus the robots take on the beast forms of recognizable animals including mammals, birds, dinosaurs, arachnids, and insects.

The Maximals




The Predacons




I really, really love this show and have since its beginning. The way that it evolved and changed over the course of its three seasons is really cool, and I greatly enjoyed the homages to the "G1" Transformers show, most notably the discovery of The Ark and Nemesis and the Beast Wars characters' interaction with Optimus Prime and the original Megatron. It's a shame that the series' successor failed to live up to the richness and depth of the writing in Beast Wars. Arguably the best display of the high quality of writing is the episode Code of Hero, the episode where one of the original Beast Wars characters dies.


Youtubes


Season 1 Opening:



Code of Hero, pt1



Code of Hero, pt2



Code of Hero, pt3